2 Good 2 Be 4 Gotten

"Yet like certain colors of the spectrum, only certain creatures know the code well enough to extract enough nourishment for themselves and like bees, nourish the others."  -from Darla Whitehead Tells All

What a day, part Steel Magnolias and yes, part Apotheosis of Johnny Cash by one Michael Cadieux. Nice place to start tomorrow morning because stories like this need the part of dawn that the birds cough up for their young. Yes, exactly that part.

She as in the second person of the self, the self who is best seen in the present as part of the past. She as in part perpetrator/protagonist and part innocent bystander.  In that way, the story can be told if it can be told at all.  It might be illegal or at least, unethical if not fully immoral to do so.  She, not herself but her, raised her head whereas her chin had been sitting squarely on her chest so that the stylist could create that undercut look, it was now looking forward with a most penetrating gaze as she said, "I regarded her as one of my best friends."  This was accompanied with an almost fiendish grin.  There were so many ways to understand that, to 'take that' as they say.  To run it through the possible filters of meaning.  Her tone of voice, well.  She did not hope that she would be heard by anyone other than "the one of her best friends" friends that sat half on and half off the chair under one of those old helmut shaped hair dryers that no one ever uses anymore, as if trying to escape.  The kind of friend you drop like a hot potato for years and out of some kind of perverse necessity, describe to someone not privy to it all, as having this sacred role of best friend.  One of.  To be clear, one of.  One of those best friends.  The kind you can obviously do without for long periods of time.  Periods of time interrupted only by chance meetings in tucked-away beauty parlors like this one which is on a road being chip sealed.  Those types of places always seem to need chip sealing.

Back to Johnny and truth be told, she hadn't noticed Cadieux's work as much as she had understood the quality of the coffee table book that the painting Apotheosis of JC (let's cut to that chase right now) appears in. JC as in the risen, as in the Hurly Girlie of Lunatic Park, the poem she had written that appeared in a feminist journal twenty years before.  There are two JC paintings Cadieux included in the small, smartly printed on mid-range art paper coffee table book.  The other is titled "JC calls out to JCC", his dearly beloved.  Both paintings worth not only second looks but actual study.  Worth hoping to one day see in person because until a person has the chance to see it in that way, they can never truly comprehend the mastery of the artist and the cohesive spirit in which something that masterful is created.  The spirit that compels whomever might view it to read into it a plethora of alternative meanings and histories. The one who, in possession of such a thing as a talent, uncovers the corollaries as if they lay under a thick carpet of dust. Uncovers these by blowing on them and whispering the words:  art/religion, art/life, art/reality, art/beauty etcetera while uttering the spell "ne plus ultra". That. 

She had taken to collecting other people's discarded books and along the way had come across some rather famous tomes.  Many of them were western themed because of where they were found, local treasures.  So valuable that people just tossed them out like trash.  Or did they?  She often thought that perhaps they were orphaned children, lost in tumultuous break-ups replete with protection orders and one party or the other tugging on a dog threatening to get litiginous and in a fit of rage, placing wonderful items in an old cardboard box and then handing them over to the personnel at the little thrift by the Dairy Queen with a diabolical, "I just don't need these anymore."  As if they were theirs to begin with.  Of course she was extremely respectful of the need to reunite book with owner when possible but in most cases, there was no way of knowing who belonged to what.  In this case the Cadieux book was meant to be right where it was, reminding her of how meaning is never far away from discovery and the facility of consciousness is free to assign as much or as little weight to the propensity of coincidence as the owner of it liked.  The owner of the consciousness that is.  What is writing or painting afterall but this?

Before Charlene revealed her one of my best friends' friend identity to the unsuspecting stylist, the two of them had taken turns investigating the other.  Darla was an open book.  Charlene on the other hand was, how to put it nicely, too smart to allow her personal life to be subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever. Social media.  All the same, even if social media weren't a thing, she'd have hidden herself from public view as much as possible.  As if she were Howard Mechanic she had assumed the identity of a school marm instead of the beauty pageant graduate and Vegas showgirl hopeful she actually was. Some women never run out of that kind of hope and even if they do reconcile the issue within themselves as they steam past the point of no return in their late thirties, the audience they engaged when they were young budding hopefuls refuses to forgive them their faux pas, their desperate charge to the top of sexual objectification that peters out somewhere between first baby and first real job in an alarmingly public way.  All the same, after a few false starts she had made it to principal of the small high school from which she graduated and then promptly, retired.  After a very short stint at the top she just vanished into the back of everyone's mind.  Only to pop up here and there as she had popped into Peg's place.

"So what are you doing nowdays then?"  Darla felt almost as if she wasn't entitled to know and in reality, she wasn't entitled.  It was more of an obligation at this point, especially after realizing there would be no escape as the dye in her own hair had to process for a whole thirty minutes.  The stylist had mistakenly taken her emerging gray roots to an extreme form of fuschia and therefore had to dye it a second time, to fix it.  Darla hated the beauty parlor.  For her it was one of the worst places in the world to be in however it was as necessary as an outhouse at the swap meet on a hot day and too many sips on the Big Gulp Thirst Buster.  Charlene though must have felt quite at home with Darla's stylist, with any stylist for that matter.  And certainly, Peg was not going to be seeing her as regularly as Darla every six weeks but the two of them appeared to be quite comfortable with the foils and unforgiving light. She was obviously an interloper here and made sure to say early on that she was living somewhere in the city, in the foothills.  That's short hand for I'm now very rich or at least, I am a bigger fish in a slightly bigger pond.  "Well, I'm retired and doing some writing."  She said it as if it were expected that she would have chosen to be a writer instead of being on the board of trustees of a notable charity in the city.  That sort of thing.

Oh no you're not I thought to myself.  Yes, me.  Darla.  The writer.  Oh no you're not.  That's my shtick and weren't you the one whose mother denied me a position on the pom squad, who never considered me for a part as a dancer with a Star Wars light saber in the extravaganza known as the Follies?  Oh yes, the time has come for that to finally become part of the collective memory known as celebrity gossip. I didn't bother to ask about the nature of her writing.  Anymore than she would have had the gall to ask me how my dancing classes were going if I'd have been so ridiculously presumptive as to assume I could learn how to dance after menopause, 30 or 40 pounds too late.  That fiendish grin, that knowing smile that revealed the entire underlying current of the awkward exchange in which Charlene doled out her special indulgence as if I ought to be grateful to her for her gracious mentioning of my role in her play, She looked every bit the part of the pageant winner holding her bouquet of long stemmed roses the way one holds a newborn while bending to pick up their pacifier and simultaneously kissing one of the children who had been shooed up onto the stage by Charlene's unapologetic mother who knew her daughter would win regardless of who was in the race. All entirely staged. There in the lackluster middle school auditorium in which she had won Stace snapped this exact photo using a flash bulb, that most archaic of artistic tools that brings darkness into light.  

Stace committed suicide forty years to the day later, not that the date matters, not anymore. I imagine that she must have been in the same weekly stay hotel up near the foothills, the "I'm rich now" foothills, the dingy place she had fallen in a few weeks before while in a drunken stupor and cut her head open to reveal part of her skull.  Having been dismissed from her marriage by her unable-to-change-her/change yourself, better-than-you husband who remained comfortably ensconced in his foothills home.   The one who honored her by attributing her suicide to alcoholism in a public announcement no one asked him to make, no one needed him to make because we all knew.  Her sons knew and they didn't need no stinking announcement even if they thought they did at the time. Never mind that alcoholism is not synonymous with suicide, no one ever threatens to get drunk to death as she did when she posted her final words, "the world doesn't need me anymore".  Never mind the idea that the until death do we part piece includes but is not limited to, failure to read the fine print in the church brochure in the first place.  Never mind the despicable negligence in reading it and plain ignoring it like he did, ignoring every single risk factor in the book.  JC, calls out to his beloved, June Carter.  In the painting, she is simply a field of blue dots and JC is only a figment of one's imagination, a few tube like squiggles that seem to be arms flailing in space but even then the wormy figures could be those happy accidents all painters know about but keep the secret to themselves. To create the sense that art is actually planned.  I assure you, it isn't.

I did not attend the pageant that night. Stace had actually been in the contest and after losing had run down into the orchestra pit to snap the shot that ended up in the old yearbook. I could not be bothered and perhaps, just perhaps I should have gone in order that I might not be one of those types of 'best friends', the kind you can do without, the kind that only shows up by accident like a squiggly figure in a post modern abstract mixed media assemblage.  The one that shows up in order that it can be captured, like in a camera, the kind that the Native Americans fear, the one that can abscond with a piece of a person's soul, the shutter of the camera like a trap door to the underworld from which no one can return.

In hopes that this does not disintegrate into the clap-trap sound of honky-tonk, the color of that flashing red light inside Stace's Days Inn back window, the one she smoked out of knowing that it wouldn't matter anyway, in hopes of that, let us pray.  Let us think well of each other and of Stace.  She was glad she never gave up the smokes even though her husband Dan hated it, said it made the cats stink.  At that moment, with the rope around her neck and ready to go, she knew she wasn't ever going to die of lung cancer and that last smoke was the sweetest one.  

Here we are Charlene.  Just you and me, how is it going?  I wanted to wait outside the salon and pull her aside and say, let's get together.  We can talk about your book.  I'd love to know.  Are you writing this story from the back side like a reverse painted lamp?

Or, am I?